When some one dies we can bring to life in ourselves the essence of what their relationship
has been bringing to us. Previously we had received from them the energy of their
own personality - enjoying their gifts with thanksgiving - now it has gone - the
only thing we can do is bring into our own possession that which we know we needed
from them. Did they give us courage? Now we must find in ourselves the source of
courage that their gift unleashed for us. In so doing we can become bigger and stronger
within the grief. It can become productive as we allow the departed one to come to
life in us. Perhaps now it is their memory that can urge us to be transformed in
their image - a memory that is charged with the energy that grief brings (a product
of the anger at our own helplessness) but this can work to our advantage as we pick
up the mantle of their legacy. Their absence still offers us something if we are
ready to do the soul-work hidden in the depths of the grief.

You (I'm referring to me!) must beat your passivity. You were brought up to be a
carer and so to be passive about your own needs. Your satisfaction was acceptable
only when it came to you unsought. You chose your form of evangelical christianity
because in it there is formula of being good: earning rewards, but you stay the passive
one in regard to your own fulfilment, and the active one only insofar as you're being
compliant to a given behavior system in order to attain the reward. This is a perpetuation
of the childish state, instead of chosing adulthood you chose to have God as a parent
figure operating a please>reward system.

Leave that behind and learn to be active, not passive, consciously choose your own
satisfaction, don't wait for it to come as reward for being good. Teach Cara the
same.

Learn to bring to your consciousness your highest ideal / thought in any situation
and take the action that would bring it about.

You know when you are most regressing into first-learning needs because you experience
the more affective / visceral disorientation emotions that you previously saw as
vital emotional messages from your psyche. These undermine your conscious volition
and are the hardest areas to overcome in that they are powerful emotional resonances
that have their own allure. But love found in this place will always have an element
of dependency because it is your 'wanting' self that is in the ascendency. Your wanting
in this respect is large, and your habits are ingrained - but you don't need them.
You now have the option to choose life in all its fulfillment although the door to
that choice will appear unfamiliar until its choice is your sustaining habit.

People who search out the 'rules' in christianity are those most likely to have experienced
conditional love. They deeply want free acceptance but find it hardest to believe.
A framework of justification allows them to feel secure because those around them
are under a duty to love and accept them as they have no excuse not to. They will
find each other out of their need and they will form like-minded sects. Perhaps they
most need to hear the voice of god ridiculing their rules as jesus did the pharisees
as they are those most likely to be proprietorial about god in order to protect their
need to know themselves as lovable by creating a system of rules.

It's a particularly adolescent thing to see the word 'freedom' and read 'the freedom
to do all those things I wasn't previously allowed to do'. It relates to the nurture
process of restriction leading to autonomy. To adults who already feel they're able
to do whatever they want the word 'freedom' must mean something else. To those caught
up in any kind of oppression - the word is the inverse of that bondage. Shows how
poor Western nurture is that grown people still think "Freedom" means living without
restrictions.